Employment Verification – An appeal to HR professionals

Appeal to HR Professionals Those of you who are HR professionals may be wondering about the title of this blog post. Yes, it is an appeal to you for helping the third party background verification agencies by providing timely input for employment background checks. Used for verifying the previous employments of a candidate, these checks are very heavily dependent upon the cooperation and support from HR team members of earlier and sometimes even current employers.
The interesting part is that in the case of employment background checks, the HR professionals are the consumers as well as suppliers of the information. Let me elaborate. While the hiring company’s HR will be the consumer of this employment verification report, the HR of the earlier company will be the supplier of the verified information. So general logic would imply that the HR professionals will understand the importance and criticality of such checks and help facilitate them in an expedited manner.
But the reality is that HR professionals are generally quite busy and such third party requests for verification of ex-employee work experience tend to sink to the bottom of their check lists.
Naturally, this leads to employment checks running over Turn-Around Time (TAT) and sometimes not getting completed at all. After repeated attempts over phone and email, eventually the third party verification agency has to give up on direct confirmation from the HR and has to use other proxy verification methods like trying to reach reporting managers, peers and subordinates. This is not the most optimal or reliable way to conduct employment checks.
One more point needs to be highlighted here. There are certain organizations that do
employment verifications
as a part of their employee background checks but who DO NOT provide any information when such requests are sent to them. This goes against the principle of reciprocity and poses a very big challenge for verification agencies as well as new employers. Such organizations need to review and loosen their policies (at the least they could just confirm the work experience if no other details can be shared).
So that is the appeal to HR professionals. Please help other HR professionals who are consumers of such employment verification reports, by providing work experience information to the extent the company policies allow. What do you think of this request?

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